Month: October 2014

The Mysterious Death Of Edgar Allan Poe

Natasha Geiling reminds us that earlier this month in 1849, the writer was found “delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter” in Baltimore. He died a few days later – and we still don’t know why, exactly. Geiling walks us through a few of the theories surrounding Poe’s death, including the notion it might have been due to “cooping,” a form of voter fraud “practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities”:

Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site whereEdgar_Allan_Poe_daguerreotype_crop Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe’s strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state.

Around the late 1870s, Poe’s biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe’s death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that “the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), ‘cooped,’ stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die.”

Another possibility for Poe’s demise?

One of the most recent theories about Poe’s death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard’s entrance. Poe’s coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe’s coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe’s body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe’s skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe’s brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe’s brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe’s death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn’t be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

Previous Dish on Poe here.

(Daguerreotype of E.A.P., 1849, via Wikimedia Commons)

America Isn’t Isolationist

Beinart makes that clear:

Given the overwhelming evidence, both from politicians and the public, that isolationism in America today is virtually nonexistent, why do so many high-profile commentators and politicians depict it as a grave threat? One clue lies in a word that these Cassandras use as a virtual synonym for isolationism: “retreat.” If the subtitle of Bret Stephens’s forthcoming book is The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, its title is America in Retreat. In their op-ed warning of a new “cycle of American isolationism,” Lieberman and Kyl employ variations of “retreat” or “retrench” six times.

But “isolationism” and “retreat” are entirely different things. Isolationism has a fixed meaning: avoiding contact with other nations. Retreat, by contrast, only gains meaning relatively. The mere fact that a country is retreating tells you nothing about the extent of its interactions overseas. You need to know the position it is retreating from. Herein lies the rub. In general, the isolationism-slayers are far more comfortable bemoaning American retreat than defending the military frontiers from which America is retreating. That’s because those frontiers, which reached their apex under George W. Bush, were both historically unprecedented and historically calamitous.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I had to do a double-take on this story, which hasn’t gotten much press stateside:

The time has come to admit that Israel is a sick society, with an illness that demands treatment, [Israeli] President Reuven Rivlin said at the opening session on Sunday of a conference on From Hatred of the Stranger to Acceptance of the Other … Rivlin wondered aloud whether Jews and Arabs had abandoned the secret of dialogue. With regard to Jews he said: “I’m not asking if they’ve forgotten how to be Jews, but if they’ve forgotten how to be decent human beings. Have they forgotten how to converse?”

The remarks were given at a conference called “From Hatred of the Stranger to Acceptance of the Other.” There was criticism of Palestinians too – and defenses of Israelis. But to hear this kind of talk from the president of the country is quite striking. If a Jewish American had used that language, the obloquy would be as intense as it would be overwhelming. If a non-Jewish American had said that, she’d be immediately denounced as a rabid anti-Semite. Which just goes to show that Israel has a far more robust culture of open debate than the US – and that the deeply troubling descent of Israel into the worst forms of tribalism and bigotry is not a fantasy made up by Max Blumenthal.

Today on the Dish, readers smacked Reza Aslan’s views on religion around a bit – though I recommend Damon Linker’s latest for a classic takedown; I launched the discussion of our Book Club on Sam Harris’ Waking Up – with a debate about whether the self actually exists or who exactly is writing this sentence; readers provided plenty of new clips for our peenage search of movies and TV (Christopher Meloni’s is here). And if you want a moment of zen, a reader from Guyana sent us this window view. Too beautiful. My musings on the liberalism of American Catholics here. My defense of Idaho bigots here.

unnamed (8)One other recommendation: gamer Dish readers take apart all you’ve heard about Gamergate. It’s a truly amazing study on what the collective Dish mind can do on a subject that the media seems to have fumbled badly. One thing that makes the Dish unique is this kind of reader input and nuance. It takes work and real art to curate and edit the in-tray the way Bodenner does. Help pay him and all our staff by, you know, subscribing, if you haven’t already. It takes a couple of minutes and only $1.99 a month.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here and modeled by the reader seen above. Another writes:

OK, you guys are now 3 for 3.  Several years ago you ran a view from a building I worked in 30 years ago (in Fairbanks, AK, of all places, and a minor campus building at that).  Later you ran a view from a hotel I had stayed in recently.  But on Sunday, you ran a view of a building that I lived in for a year, 40+ years ago (center left, on the corner just across the street).

And in none of those cases did I recognize the view before looking at the caption.  How embarrassing.

As a bonus, here’s a view OF the window of my daughter’s college dorm room. (We have no idea who sent it in, but apparently the VFYW phenomenon is affecting a second generation, too.) And you also once ran a view from my office window, but I sent that in. Thanks from a long-time reader, two-year subscriber.

See you in the morning.

“I Read Myself Out Of The Closet”

And other quotes from a variety of gay and lesbian writers:

Philip Kennicott looks back with ambivalence at the classic gay literature – think Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Andre Gide, and Thomas Mann, among others – that shaped the way he came to terms with his own sexuality. While certain novels allowed him to understand he wasn’t alone, the “pleasure of finding new access to these worlds was almost always punctured by the bleakness of the books themselves”:

It is painful to read the bulk of this early canon, and it will only become more and more painful, as gay subcultures dissolve, and the bourgeois respectability that so many of these authors abandoned yet craved becomes the norm. In Genet, marriage between two men was the ultimate profanation, one of the strongest inversions of value the author could muster to scandalize his audience and delight his rebellious readers. The image of same-sex marriage was purely explosive, a strategy for blasting apart the hypocrisy and pretentions of traditional morality. Today, it is becoming commonplace.

I wonder if these books will survive like the literature of abolition, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—marginal, dated, remembered as important for its earnest, sentimental ambition, but also a catalog of stereotypes. Or if they will be mostly forgotten, like the nineteenth-century literature of aesthetic perversity and decadence that many of these authors so deeply admired? Will Gide and Genet be as obscure to readers as Huysmans and the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)?

I hope not, and not least because they mattered to me, and helped forge a common language of reference among many gay men of my generation. I hope they survive for the many poignant epitaphs they contain, grave markers for the men who were used, abused, and banished from their pages. Let me write them down in my notebook, so I don’t forget their names: Hans, who loved Hermann; Basini, who loved Törless; the Page of Herodias, who loved the Young Syrian; Giovanni, who loved David; and the all rest, unnamed, often with no voice, but not forgotten.

Ebolisis And Its Enablers

Derek Thompson blames the media for overhyping – and thereby exacerbating – Ebola panic in the US:

For the last two weeks, the American Ebola panic has been relentlessly overstated. When Gallup asked Americans if they were worried about contracting the Ebola virus, just 23 percent said yes in a October 11-12 poll, days after Thomas Duncan was the first person to die in America from the disease. That was up just one percentage point (well within the margin of error) from a similar survey administered one week earlier. Just 16 percent told Gallup that they actually thought someone in their family would likely get the virus, up just two percentage points from a week earlier.

One in six people thinking they’re about to die from Ebola is a serious matter. But you can get about approximately 20 percent of Americans to say all sorts of crazy things in anonymous polls.

Waldman takes on another trope of Ebolisis – that in the words of Republican Congressman Tim Murphy, “we have to be right 100 percent of the time, and Ebola only has to get in once.” It’s the viral equivalent of the one percent doctrine:

The objection some now have to the federal government’s response is that it isn’t enough like our response to terrorism, which is to say it doesn’t reflect that 100 percent perspective. You can find that perspective in some places — for instance, today the New York Times reports on some of the reaction from people who are both terrified and ignorant, like the parents who kept their kids home from school because the principal had travelled to Zambia, where there has been no Ebola despite being in the very same continent as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. So why not close all the schools? And while we’re at it, stop all flights in and out of Texas and post Army units at the highways on the state’s border with shoot-to-kill orders on anyone trying to leave? After all, Ebola only has to be right once.

All of this underscores Saletan’s point that when it comes to public health, giving the public what it wants is simply nuts:

Rep. Sam Johnson of Texas is introducing a travel ban in Congress because Obama “is refusing to listen to the American people.” Virginia lawmakers, citing the views of “the American people,” are calling for a ban on travel from West Africa to their state. Behind these initiatives, an army of conservative media outlets is quoting polls and trumpeting what “the American people want” and “the American people favor.”

On some issues, this kind of thinking is healthy. It’s democracy. But on matters of science and medicine, it’s reckless. The reason why public opinion on Ebola diverges sharply from what experts recommend, not just on a travel ban but on everyday behaviors to avoid the virus, is sheer ignorance. Telling health officials to listen to the public, rather than the other way around, is the worst kind of demagoguery.

License To Strip

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Elizabeth Nolan Brown asks whether it’s really necessary for strippers to have occupational licenses:

Dancers and managers at a Washington state strip club are now suing to stop their county from releasing their names, photos, and other identifying information to a man who has filed a public records request for it. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma [last] Tuesday, says the Pierce County Auditor’s Office received a request from David A. Van Vleet for copies of all adult entertainment licenses on file for Dreamgirls at Fox’s. Why does this man want identifying info on current and former dancers at the Tacoma-based strip club? Nobody knows. (I reached out to Van Vleet yesterday but haven’t heard back.) But because strippers in most areas of Washington must obtain an “entertainer’s license”, their identities are a matter of public record.

Attorney Gilbert H. Levy acknowledged that the information was technically fair game under the state Public Records Act, but said the privacy and safety interests of strip club workers necessitates keeping their real names and identities confidential. “It’s a unique occupation and it’s a controversial occupation,” Levy told CBS Seattle. “Some people like nude dancers, and other people for religious or for other philosophical reasons don’t. There’s some stigma attached to the occupation, and most dancers for personal privacy reasons and safety reasons, don’t want the customers to know who they are outside of the club.”

In other words, it’s entirely likely the person who wants this information is a crazy stalker or an anti-sex nutjob. Maybe merely a blackmailer or a 4chan-er. At any rate, it’s hard to imagine many non-nefarious reasons for requesting personal information on a wide swath of individuals in a sensitive job.

(Photo by Flickr user Michael)

Why Are The Midterms So Meh?

Nate Cohn declares that “this is a great election. It’s way better than 2012. All around, it might be the best general election in a decade.”

There are a dozen competitive and close Senate contests and, for good measure, there are another dozen competitive governors’ contests. Better still, these close Senate races add up to something meaningful and important: control of the Senate.

But Americans are nevertheless losing interest in the midterms. How Suderman explains the lack of enthusiasm:

With just two weeks until election day, the most striking thing about the 2014 midterm may be how petty and substance-free it is. No major policy issue has defined this election; no major legislation is immediately at stake. It is possible to find candidates talking about a variety of policy issues—Obamacare, the minimum wage, immigration, the Export-Import bank, and more—but the implications are described almost entirely in political terms. For the most part, the focus for both parties is not on what they would do, but what they wouldn’t, not who they are, but who they aren’t. It’s an election about nothing, except, perhaps, who one hates the most. …

The result is an election in which Democrats cannot run on what they have done, and Republicans cannot run on what they will do. So petty squabbles and Twitter-friendly soundbites dominate the news as each side attempts to drive turnout by campaigning the notion that the other party is worse—for women or for struggling workers, for the economy or for America’s place in the world. It’s not an election about which side to vote for. It’s an election about which side to vote against.

Map Of The Day

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Amanda Taub highlights the work data journos at The Guardian have been doing with Wikileaks’ Iraq War logs. Each red dot on the above map – the screenshot seen above only shows one corner of Baghdad, but the project covers the whole country – represents one of some 60,000 combat-related fatal incidents (mostly IEDs) between 2004 and 2009, representing more than 100,000 deaths. And that’s not even the whole story, as Taub points out:

[T]he true extent of the violence is much worse: the map likely only shows a small fraction of the attacks from that period. The database the map is drawn from does not include deaths from criminal activity, or those that were initiated by Coalition or Iraqi forces. And many deaths may not have been officially tallied. That means that the real total is almost certainly much higher. But even seeing the number of attacks recorded here shows how devastating this war has been to Baghdad’s civilians, who must now face even more attacks.

What Is The Surgeon General Good For?

Part of the liberal line in the political battle over Ebola is that we’d be much better placed to respond to the crisis if only Congressional Republicans would stop stonewalling the confirmation of Obama’s nominee Dr. Vivek Murthy to the post of surgeon general, which has been empty for over a year. But Mike Stobbe doubts this would really make much difference, considering how the role of the surgeon general has changed over time from front-lines crusader against disease to mere public health advocate:

[I]t was in the 1960s, during the Democratic presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, that things really started to go downhill for the surgeon general. Administration officials were pushing to enact Great Society programs, and increasingly viewed the surgeon general and his troops as foot-draggers reluctant to take on the new initiatives—especially Medicare and Medicaid. … Dr. Luther Terry became renowned in 1964 for releasing a report that finally convinced many Americans of the deadliness of cigarette smoking, but he was shown the door a year later, after only one term. By 1968, the HEW Secretary had stripped away the surgeon general’s administrative powers and redistributed them to others.

Since then, the surgeon general has been little more than a health educator—“a pathetic shadow of authority who traveled around the country lecturing high school students on the hazards of smoking,” as the political scientist Eric Redman once wrote.

McArdle takes a broader view, noting that “this is not your grandfather’s public health system”:

Public health experts were, in a way, too successful;

they beat back our infectious disease load to the point where most of us have never had anything more serious than Human papillomavirus or a bad case of the flu. This left them without that much to do. So they reinvented themselves as the overseers of everything that might make us unhealthy, from French Fries to work stress. As with the steel mills, these problems are not necessarily amenable to the organizational tools used to tackle tuberculosis. The more the public and private health system are focused on these problems, the less optimized they will be for fighting the war against infectious disease. It is less surprising to find that they didn’t know how to respond to a novel infectious disease than it would have been to discover that they botched a new campaign against texting and driving.

Don’t get me wrong: Fighting infection is still one of the things that the public health infrastructure does, and though I hope it doesn’t come to that, I expect that our system will do a much better job next time. But the CDC did not botch the job because there’s something wrong with Barack Obama, or government, or the state of Texas, or private hospitals. They dropped the ball because the public health system no longer needs to work so many miracles, and consequently hasn’t had much practice.

The way Steven Malanga sees it, CDC Director Thomas Frieden’s embrace of that new role as nanny-in-chief is part of why he’s not really that good at his job:

As New York City’s health commissioner, Frieden engineered a law requiring food chains to post calorie counts on menus, though there was no evidence that the availability of such information has any effect on eating habits. Frieden also led a campaign to cut salt consumption despite studies that had shown, in fact, that some individuals fared poorly on a salt-restricted diet. Frieden’s campaign led one world-renown hypertension expert to proclaim that New York was attempting to engineer a giant uncontrolled experiment.

As time passed, Frieden’s practice of recommending sometimes outrageous solutions to health problems based on few facts grew more disconcerting. In 2007, he even proposed a campaign to persuade uncircumcised adult men in New York to get circumcised to reduce their risk to HIV; a study in Africa had concluded that the practice helped lower infections there. But Frieden’s proposal was widely derided and quickly dismissed because of the vast differences between the two populations and the preliminary nature of the research.

Ugh. Back to the issue at hand, Byron York blames the surgeon general vacancy on Democrats rather than Republicans:

[H]ere is the basic fact about charges that Republicans are blocking the surgeon general nominee: There are 55 Democrats in the Senate. Since Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the rules to kill filibusters for nominations, it would take just 51 votes to confirm Murthy. Democrats could do it all by themselves, even if every Republican opposed. But Democrats have not confirmed Murthy.

The reason has more to do with Murthy himself than anything else. As doctors go, he is a very political man, so it’s no surprise his politics have created political problems.

York notes that the NRA “took a strong stand against Murthy, a position that caught the attention not only of Republicans but of red-state Democrats seeking re-election.” Weigel adds context:

The NRA actually promised to score votes for Murthy – anyone who backed him would see a drop in his grade from the gun lobby. Among the horribles that made Murthy unacceptable were tweets like this (as York cites):

You can see why the NRA wanted to prevent such a doctor from becoming surgeon general. And you can sort of see why red state Democrats begged Harry Reid to prevent a vote on him.